Treasure Island / Skeleton Island
A photographic study by Alan McFetridge made on La Graciosa, an island in the Atlantic Ocean whose volcanic landscape bears a striking resemblance to the imagined Skeleton Island in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
Above: Robert Louis Stevenson’s map of Treasure Island, shown alongside La Graciosa in the Atlantic Ocean. Alan McFetridge’s project begins from the resemblance between Stevenson’s imagined Skeleton Island and the volcanic landscape of La Graciosa.
Is Skeleton Island Real?
Skeleton Island is best known as the fictional island in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel Treasure Island. This project approaches La Graciosa as a real landscape that appears to echo Stevenson’s imagined geography: remote, volcanic, exposed to Atlantic currents, and edged by few beaches, craggy rocks and difficult shorelines.
About the Project
The titles in this series are taken from the map Stevenson drew to accompany Treasure Island. In McFetridge’s photographs, La Graciosa becomes a place where literature, projection and ecological reality meet: an island carrying the shape of adventure fiction while facing the material pressures of tourism, water scarcity and ocean plastic.
Today La Graciosa is accessible by boat from Lanzarote and forms part of a UNESCO-listed reserve of islets and marine areas. The volcanic landscape remains largely undisturbed, crossed by a small number of unsealed tracks used by tourists and reserve caretakers. Without a natural water supply, island life depends on desalinated water piped from Lanzarote and a frequent ferry service bringing visitors and supplies.
The island is also a gathering point for plastic carried by ocean currents from Africa and Europe. In this fragile landscape, the mythology of buried treasure is set against another form of arrival: discarded material washing ashore, breaking down and entering the food chain as microplastic.
Project Gallery
Photographs from Treasure Island / Skeleton Island, made on La Graciosa, Canary Islands, October 2018.
List of works
Selected works from Treasure Island / Skeleton Island are available as limited-edition photographic prints. The series was made on La Graciosa, Canary Islands, in October 2018, and connects Robert Louis Stevenson’s imagined Skeleton Island with a real Atlantic landscape of volcanic ground, ocean currents, tourism and ecological pressure.
Print enquiries are welcome from collectors, interior designers, curators and institutions.
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All images © Alan McFetridge